The Freeman's Fire of 1955 ravaged much of the same portions of boardwalks in Seaside Heights and Seaside Park as on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2013. / Terry Groffie Collection/Courtesy Seaside Heights

The Freeman's Fire of 1955 ravaged much of the same portions of boardwalks in Seaside Heights and Seaside Park as on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2013. / Terry Groffie Collection/Courtesy Seaside Heights

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The fire alarm rousted Charles Millwater from his bed a half-hour earlier than usual on that Thursday morning.

He left his upstairs apartment on Vansant Avenue and walked across the street to the Island Heights fire station. A captain with the department, Millwater dressed out and hopped into the department’s brand-new pumper truck. The team drove east toward Seaside Heights.

At the crest of the bridge crossing Barnegat Bay, Millwater saw funnels of gray and black smoke floating across the sky. The 27-year-old didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the worst fire in Seaside Heights history.

And 58 years is about all that separates the two most disastrous fires in the history of the Seasides. On Thursday, a sweeping blaze cut along the boardwalks from Kohr’s frozen custard stand in Seaside Park to Lincoln Avenue in Seaside Heights – nearly the same stretch reduced to ash that day in 1955 in what is known as Freeman’s Fire.

The two infernos also share haunting traits. They took all the help of surrounding towns and counties to fight them. Water pressure troubles and driving winds bedeviled firefighters. The flames threatened to jump into town. At times, the fires were completely out of control.

Morning broke gray and foggy on June 9, 1955, Seaside Heights Fire Chief Dell Hopson’s 46th birthday. He was rattled awake around 6:45 a.m. by the “hoarse warning sound” of the fire alarm, he told writer Vincent Ken in an article, “The $4,000,000 Fire,” published in the magazine Male in December, 1955.

Millwater, now 84, said that at that time of day at that time of year, the boardwalk was empty, so the fire had a dangerous start on responders. Eight buildings on the boardwalk near DuPont Avenue were ablaze by the time Chief Hopson arrived in the department’s LaFrance pumper.

“That is it, I thought,” Hopson wrote. “This is the big one we’ve been afraid of.”

The fire is believed to have started in a neon sign on the boardwalk and quickly moved south toward Seaside Park. Ocean winds of up to 50 mph swept the flames across the clustered wood-framed shops and through the popular Dentzel carousel, according to Emil R. Salvini in his book, “Boardwalk Memories: Tales of The Jersey Shore.”

“Gases shot upward in big balls and exploded into tongues of flame that shot 100 feet into the air,” according to Hopson.

While Seaside Heights’ crews battled in vein to manage the out-of-control blaze, the Island Heights pumper drew water from Barnegat Bay.

“I never got up to the fire,” said Millwater, who at the time ran a cleaning business, Millwater Floor Service. “I was standing in the water holding the hose.”

He watched flames and smoke rise and embers blowing onto other buildings. He also saw the Seaside Heights mayor, J. Stanley Tunney, who controlled a mulititude of boardwalk properties that had belonged to his predecessor, Frank Freeman.

As a result, Tunney took the hardest hit in the fire, according to Salvini. He resolved to bring the boardwalk and carousel back.

“No sooner had the ashes of the fire cooled when the tenacious mayor set off to replace it,” Salivini wrote.

By 9:15 a.m., Hopson wrote, fire main water pressure fell off, a similar problem firefighters had in Thursday’s fire. The inferno had already burned one block and was threatening to burn another, from Porter to Stockton avenues in Seaside Park – where Thursday’s fire broke out. It tore along the boardwalk.

“Suddenly, ammunition from a shooting gallery began to pop like a string of Chinese firecrackers,” he wrote.

Hopson drew a new fire line a block south at around 10 a.m. The rubber coating of their slickers melting, firefighters held bucking hoses against the flames. By 11:30 a.m. the fire was under control – “We had won,” according to Hopson.

In all, 85 buildings on three blocks were destroyed and damages totaled at least $4 million, according to Hopson. Thursday’s fire stretched six boardwalk blocks and destroyed about 30 businesses, Gov. Chris Christie said.

After the flames were out in 1955, firefighters repaired to the police station parking lot, where an auxiliary handed out coffee and donuts, Millwater said.

“Everybody in the fire company was involved in the neighborhood. A lot of people worked there,” said Millwater, now a realtor. “They just didn’t understand, because that’s where they worked and played.”

Millwater was sad, too. He learned that one of the first locations to catch fire was a small triangular stand called Bert’s, where at the age of 15 he got his first job, making popcorn and selling shovels, buckets and suntan lotion.

Tunney’s carousel was charred, but he soon found a replacement in Coney Island, New York, and purchased it for $22,000.

Millwater said many operators had temporary stands up and running within weeks of the fire, ready for business for the season. And the two towns rebuilt their boardwalks in time for the next summer.

“The stink from the worst fire in shore history hung over the town,” Hopson wrote. “But the town had one consolation. It was still there to smell it!”